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Friday, November 7, 2014

Linden Lab Sells Desura

Just weeks after it announced plans to cease development of its sandbox game "Patterns," Linden Lab announce in a press release yesterday that it was handing over its distribution service "Desura" to Bad Juju Games.Bad Juju has taken over all day-to-day support, maintenance, and ongoing enhancements to the Desura website and service platform. The Bad Juju team will be reaching out directly to developers with games on Desura and are happy to respond to any questions they may have. Transitioning Desura
to a new owner is great for Linden Lab and our customers, as it allows
us to further enhance our focus on creating the ambitious next-generation virtual world, while continuing to improve Second Life and growing Blocksworld. Desura
is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look
forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad
Juju Games.

Bad Juju Games described themselves, "Founded in 2010, Bad juju Games has assembled a highly experienced team
of veteran video game industry developers and artists to build the next
generation middleware technology platform for the Mobile, Console and PC
Gaming markets."

As the Gaming industry continues to evolve at a dramatic rate, Bad Juju
Games is dedicated to providing solutions for Mobile, Console and PC
based Developers that significantly level the playing field and provide
many of the core services that Gamers have come to expect from top
grossing game titles. Through its acquisition of Desura, Bad Juju Games
will be offering its Developers at no additional costs, the core modules
and services such as Leaderboards, Achievements, Cloud Storage, Player
Stats and Profiles and its Business Intelligence that are also fully
cross-platform. (click here for the complete press release)

Linden Lab purchased Desura last year in July 2013, the latest of a number of acquisitions and new products under Rod Humble/Rodvik Linden, the CEO at the time under his strategy of diversifying the company's line of products. After Ebbe Altberg/Ebbe Linden became CEO, one by one, Linden Lab would discontinue these products. With Desura's sale, only Blocksworld remains of them. It has stood out from the others as it's proven to be a source of income.

Others have commented about Linden Lab's move. Inara Pey commented that the sale of Desura was no surprise to her, noting that in his interview by Saffia Widdershins last month Ebbe was talking about the company cleaning up the product line in the present tense rather than the past tense. Iris Ophelia reminded her readers that when she called Linden Lab's decision to buy Desura last year a great idea, she had noted that it truly would be only if the Lab made an effort to fix Desura's flaws. As it turned out, it was difficult to browse through, and not much progress was made on that until August.

With three products left in Linden Lab's line up, the company has clearly been bringing it's focus back to virtual worlds rather than diversifying. While it means no more sources of revenue outside Second Life, hopefully for it's residents this means the company behind it can focus more on cleaning it's bugs and improving it.